Fish - - Page 11

by BS

Classy Cheating Confessions

You know us ESers are wont to talk a lot of smack about cheating — cutting corners in the kitchen by using pre-made “ingredients” that could just as easily be made from scratch. But even though we love to hate, you know we all do it, too, in our own ways. Whether I’m cooking from scratch or warming up leftovers in the toaster oven, these three pre-made standbys have saved many a meal.

1. Anchovy Paste: I first discovered this sketchy-sounding ingredient in a Gourmet recipe for steak with anchovy garlic butter, which really is already cheating, because you’re basically buttering a g-damn steak. How could that not be delicious? But the anchovy paste — which comes in a little squeeze tube and doesn’t look anything like anchovies — is pretty amazing. It’s basically pureed ‘chovies mixed up with some olive oil, spices, and I’m not really sure what else. It doesn’t taste nearly as strong and fishy as eating one of those little guys whole, but it adds a super-rich, almost creamy element to any dish. When I make a pasta dish that needs to be set off a little bit, I squeeze in a little bit bit of this stuff and it takes it to another level. I know some of you may be grossed out, but trust me, you wouldn’t even know it was in there! It doesn’t have that intense anchovy taste (especially if you use just a touch in a whole dish), but somehow it instantly makes any dish rich and delicious.

2. Truffle Oil: Yeah, yeah, I know. Truffles are more overhyped than sliced bread. But we all know there’s a reason why. And while ES isn’t bringing in enough revenue yet for me to keep a pinch of fresh white truffles in the cabinet at all times, I have been known to fall back on the oily version. I got a tiny bottle of it as a gift a while back and honestly, it’s made me ten times less creative in the kitchen, because any time I get to the end of a dish and don’t think it’s quite there, I just throw in some TO and call it a day. And you know what? It always makes it amazing. Pasta? Potatoes? Breakfast cereal? It’s hard to find something that can’t use a little truffle oil. I think it’s as much the earthy, pungent smell as the taste that sets a dish off. When my little bottle ran off after about a year, I decided not to buy another one, just so that I would be forced to experiment more in the kitchen. But then my mom went and got me another bottle for Christmas. And I’m not mad at all. The most amazing thing is that while it seems ridiculously expensive, it’s really not–because you use literally a drop or two every time, that tiny little $20 bottle is gonna last you a year, and trust me, it will rescue so, so, many meals.

by gansie

My Resolution to Start Smoking This New Year

I think the first time I had smoked fish was in sushi, not the oft walked Jewish path of lox on a bagel with cream cheese. I had plenty of exposure to smoked salmon and smoked whitefish salad, mostly at bat mitzvah luncheons and funerals. Unfortunately, my personal smoked fish craze didn’t hit until I was living in DC, and we notoriously lack Jewish delis.

However, 80 and I just celebrated friends’ wedding in southern Florida, eating and partying our way through Sunny Isles Beach, Hollywood and West Palm Beach. And wow, it was nice to be around the Jews. I never can find the pleasure of smoked whitefish in the District. There are maybe 2 New York style delis in the area, and I haven’t fell in love with either of them.

But in Florida! Florida!

After the nuptials, 80 and I visited with my grandmother. While at lunch I schmeared smoked whitefish salad on a pumpernickel bagel (80 choose wrongly and ordered the *lean* pastrami sandwich and Mommom took down matzah brei, a bagel and hash browns). Whitefish salad is less pungent than smoked salmon, it’s creamier than a tuna salad consistency, but with a saltier, less generic taste. It also doesn’t reek of mayo.

Later that day at my aunt and uncle’s golf clubhouse, the free (!) snacks offered in the bar area were smoked whitefish salad right next to boursin cheese (It was actually quite funny, they had a chef in full whites slicing the boursin on a wooden cutting board akin to prime rib), swiss cheese triangles, broccoli florets, grape tomatoes and crackers. It was a mid-winter miracle.

So apparently we’re in week four of the New Year. I had this majestic resolution—obviously food related—but I haven’t started it yet. I will start making claims now. I will hopefully cash them in before 2011.

I will smoke a white fish. Whatever a white fish is. I will then take that smoked white fish and make a salad out of it.

There.

(Photo: PS95)

by tvff

Top 10 Jersey Shore Foods

Like it or not, MTV’s new reality train wreck Jersey Shore has vaulted that curious species, the self-identified “Guido” into the public consciousness, much to the dismay of New Jerseyans, Italian-Americans and anyone with an IQ above 78. I know…you thought these Guidos and “Guidettes” were just another figment of the New Jersey imagination like the Jersey Devil and affordable real estate. As much as I would like to pretend idiots like this don’t exist, I’m afraid that anyone who has spent significant time in the Garden State — including natives like gansie and myself — has some across an example of the species, typically traveling in a pack. And now they are beamed right to your home by the magic of television. Consider it payback for the state providing you with a setting for the best show of the past ten years, The Sopranos. Gotta pay the piper sooner or later.

This joyous television experience got us thinking, though: Man does not live on soy protein, Axe Body Spray and Miller Lite alone. The Jersey shore offers a cornucopia of wonderful, horrible and wonderfully-horrible food products that will hopefully all make cameos during the season. Let this handy list of the Top 10 Jersey Shore Foods be your guide to understanding the culinary choices available to the cast.

10. Mack & Manco Pizza

Pizza is a staple of Jersey boardwalk fare, and Ocean City’s Mack & Manco is the best on the promenade. This is a decidedly NYC-style pie — the big floppy kind that you can fold in half and chow down on while you walk. Unlike the trash that drifts down to Jersey to participate on the show, this is one NYC import we can all enjoy. (Photo: Infinite Jeff)

9. Dippin’ Dots

The future of ice cream! Or so they’ve been telling us for the past twenty five years. At what point will the future actually get here so I can throw out my Ben & Jerry’s? These ice-cold globules used to be a “special occasion” item that you would see for sale at the shore. These days, I can buy them from a machine at the mall. Kinda takes the charm out of it. (Photo: newwavegurly)

8. Salt Water Taffy

All the nutritional value of a conversation with Mike “The Situation,” these chewy treats are the bane of brace-wearing children everywhere. Each box always includes some bullshit story about how the taffy was invented when candy fell into seawater, but you’re mostly just interested in getting the good flavors and shafting your siblings with the banana and licorice. Corn syrup + artificial flavoring = awesome. (Photo: Live?Laugh?Love)

7. Boardwalk Fries

These things are so good that they made a mediocre fast food franchise out of them! The signs that say the fries are cooked in “100% peanut oil” were tantalizingly exotic to a third grader in the 1980s (yeah, my horizons have expanded since then), and the fact that they sliced the potatoes on premises made it even more fun. The medium-cut sticks are great for the most part — the fries that you get from the center of the potatoes are long and perfectly cooked — but the unfortunate slices that are nicked off the edges invariably lead to a pile of deep-fried potato skins in the bottom of your paper cup. Bummer. (Photo: roboppy)

6. Binge Drinking

Sure, it’s not technically a food item, but it does account for approximately 56% of the total calories consumed at the Jersey shore. In fact, I think that national Beer Pong Championships are held in Wildwood Crest. (Photo: C o l i n)

Next: Top 5 Jersey Shore Foods

in Desserts / Featured / Fish / Lists / Top 10 Lists / TV 23 comments

by BS

November Madness: Jalen Rose’s Fab Five Food Finds

Woo-hoo for November 9th! In case you don’t know, this week marks the tip-off of Endless Simmer’s favorite sport, drunk college food-off, er…NCAA college basketball season!

To make the occasion, we asked Jalen Rose, member of the University of Michigan’s legendary Fab Five team, to put on his restaurant critic hat and share a few of his favorite food finds from around the nation. The 13-year NBA veteran is now an ESPN/ABC studio analyst, and in his free time he can be found blogging, tweeting, Facebooking and YouTube-ing. Take it away, Jalen!

I wouldn’t consider myself a food critic, but during my years as a professional basketball player, I was lucky to travel the country and eat in many fine establishments. Below is a list of my Fab Five Foods and where you can find them. All of these dishes are original — I haven’t found another restaurant that prepares these items in the same way. If you get a chance to check them out, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do:

1. Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse (Chicago, IL) – Double Baked Potato… so good its bang is worth every buck – this is one big spud!

2. Philippe (Upper East Side New York, NY) – Maine Lobster Satay… lobster is my favorite dish and this is my favorite lobster on a stick… not only is the satay great, the peanut sauce is so good that you can almost drink it by itself!

in Celebs / Fish / Fowl 0 comments

by C. Christy Concrete

Green Tea & Almond Cupcakes

_{The ancient Japanese cupcake ceremony.}

(Author’s note: this is my last cupcake post for a while; I’m being sent to India for a work assignment next week, and baking is not in the equation. Watch this space, however; there may very well appear some one-off features on the challenges and oddities of an expatriate trying to eat in the Asian subcontinent.)

Last week I received some sample packets of matcha from Matcha Source. Matcha is traditional Japanese green tea powder, and I’ve wanted to use it in cupcakes for awhile now, but its relatively pricey price in America has so far discouraged me. It’s not that I’m a tea snob; on the contrary, I enjoy a nice cuppa. Black teas provide a gentler morning “lift” as opposed to coffee’s caffeine bitch-slap, regular bagged green teas are excellent for detoxing, (Yamamotoyama’s genmai-cha is a personal favorite) and Mighty Leaf makes a nice camomille blend that doesn’t taste too much like soap.

Fun fact: herbal teas aren’t technically teas at all since most of them contain botanicals and aromatics and no real tea leaves.

Matcha, however, is something altogether different. Steamed and dried, green tea leaves are then stone ground over and over again until a fine, silky powder is produced. Since matcha is mixed directly with water and not steeped, you consume the tea leaf itself, which makes for a very heady, earthy, albeit bitter, brew.

_{There wasn’t even enough of Dr. Manhattan’s remains to bury after Ozymandias got through with him.}

As for the cupcakes, if you take any lesson away from reading this today, it’s this: recipes are written down for a reason. What that reason is varies from cook to cook, but for the most part, it’s to provide a proven, documented legacy of culinary functionality for anyone who comes after that initial session in the kitchen. That said, I’m a person who likes to experiment with recipes, to tweak little things here and there, take something out and add something else, to make the dish my own and create my own legacy. There’s supposedly an unwritten rule among amateur cooks that states you can claim an established recipe as your own creation if you change at least three things about it, which has been the case for most of the cupcakes I’ve posted here during my tenure at ES.

But, as we all know, baking recipes are different than just mucking with a recipe for borscht or noodle soup or green bean casserole. Tweak something the wrong way, and you get a Friday Fuck Up that doesn’t care what day of the week it is.

in Desserts / Endless Cupcakes / Fish / Recipe 9 comments

by gansie

Head-On Cooking

Editors’ Note: Here’s more from LC. Reminder – her mom’s a chef; she’s clueless in the kitchen.

So, I was at Whole Foods the other day milling about the fresh fish and it occurred to me I had never cooked a whole fish. As in one that looked like a fish with its head on and everything.

Whole Foods had the cutest looking trout and I thought I should try it since I was just going to make it for myself and if I screwed up:
a) no one would have to suffer along with me
and
b) I could submit it for Friday Fuck Ups.

I did get a little nervous about the preparation so I called Babs, my mom and a chef, for instructions.

LC: Mom, I’m in the grocery store and about to buy some fish. How should I make it?
Mom (getting her chef voice on): What kind of fish?
LC: Trout, with the head on and everything.
Mom: OK, get some shallots and lemon. Saute the shallots in butter and wine with salt and pepper. Squeeze some lemon on the fish and then throw it in with the shallots. To make an actual sauce reduce the shallot sauce in a little wine and maybe broth.
LC: I only have red wine, though. Will that work?
Mom (deeply sighing and wondering if, despite 9 months of gestation and 30 years of raising me, actually gave birth to someone so incompetent): Yes, red wine is fine.

I bought the trout and realized I actually did have a white-ish wine, Champagne (which frankly goes better with a white fish, Mom). Plus, it was rapidly going flat in my fridge. So I bring you…

in Fish / Recipe 6 comments

by Bliz

Friday Fuck Ups: How Not to Fillet a Fish

I’m not really sure why I prefer to cut my own fillets. Gutting and cutting up a fish is messy, smelly and if continually done wrong too many times, can take away from the final dish. But then again… it’s a chance to play with knives and gross out my friends.

To me, the positives outweigh the negatives. Money is also a factor, but then again, you pay less for a whole fish then you would buying pre-cut fillets at Whole Foods.

If you’ve ever watched a Julia Child show or bothered to look up the process on filleting a whole round fish on YouTube, it looks incredibly easy. It can be, though, if you can push past any queasiness of the fish looking up at you while you grotesquely hack up several whole fish figuring out the process.

And even after you think you’ve figured it out, there are days like last Friday where you have basically forgotten how to ride the bike and swerve uncontrollably into a trash can.

So what say you ESers? Am I just wasting my time and perfectly good fish by messing around with my own fillets? Should I leave it to the fish mongers? Produce another Friday Fuck Up? Keep trying it myself?

A decent salvage after the jump.

in Fish 8 comments